Monthly Archives: May 2015

Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang gave Dortmund a dream start, but Luiz Gustavo brought the Wolves back on terms before Kevin De Bruyne put Dieter Hecking’s men in front. Bas Dost added a third before half-time, wrapping up victory for the Wolves and inflicting defeat on Jürgen Klopp in his final game as Dortmund coach.

What mattered to this new generation of leftists was the distribution of cultural power among groups—not the fortunes and universal rights of “working men” in the abstract but the fortunes and rights of specific types of men and women, whose race or gender or sect was “privileged” and whose was not. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the absurdities of planned economies settled one question. But the political and social and cultural questions—who was on top, what spoils would they reap—remained open.

…In his policies and his idealism, Bernie Sanders is something of a fossil: a relic of socialism past. I disagree with his conclusions and prescriptions, but I admire his honesty and his goal of helping all Americans regardless of race or ethnicity or religion. What I can’t stand are the liberals who disguise their profit-seeking and social prominence by claiming to stand with the oppressed, who never miss an opportunity to signal their allegiance to the cause of the day, but who would never set foot in Baltimore without a security detail, and have never lost a job because an undocumented worker priced them out of the market.

Hammurabi and the American Founding Fathers alike imagined a reality governed by universal and immutable principles of justice, such as equality or hierarchy. Yet the only place where such universal principles exist is in the fertile imagination of Sapiens, and in the myths they invent and tell one another. These principles have no objective validity. It is easy for us to accept that the division of people into ‘superiors’ and ‘commoners’ is a figment of the imagination. Yet the idea that all humans are equal is also a myth. In what sense do all humans equal one another? Is there any objective reality, outside the human imagination, in which we are all equal? Are all humans equal to one another biologically?

…Advocates of equality and human rights may be outraged by this line of reasoning. Their response is likely to be, ‘We know that people are not equal biologically! But if we believe that we are all equal in essence, it will enable us to create a stable and prosperous society.’ I have no argument with that. This is exactly what I mean by ‘imagined order’. We believe in a particular order not because it is objectively true, but because believing in it enables us to cooperate effectively and forge a better society. Imagined orders are not evil conspiracies or useless mirages. Rather, they are the only way large numbers of humans can cooperate effectively. Bear in mind, though, that Hammurabi might have defended his principle of hierarchy using the same logic: ‘I know that superiors, commoners and slaves are not inherently different kinds of people. But if we believe that they are, it will enable us to create a stable and prosperous society.’

It’s likely that more than a few readers squirmed uncomfortably in their chairs while reading the preceding paragraphs. Most of us today are educated to react in such a way. It is easy to accept that Hammurabi’s code was a myth, but we do not want to hear that human rights are also a myth. If people realize that human rights exist only in the imagination, isn’t there a danger that our society will collapse? Voltaire said about God that ‘there is no God, but don’t tell that to my servant, lest he murder me at night.’ Hammurabi would have said the same about his principle of hierarchy, and Thomas Jefferson about human rights. Homo sapiens has no natural rights, just as spiders, hyenas and chimpanzees have no natural rights. But don’t tell that to our servants, lest they murder us at night.

Still, I Google every single person I meet. Sometimes out of necessity, sometimes out of curiosity. And I bet you, to some extent, do that, too. It’s a reflex now, and like a cliche of Internet culture: If I can access information, why wouldn’t I?

…“People need to understand that we’re in a new era right now. That era is one of complete transparency: You can see and hear and watch what people do more than we ever could before.”

Does Barnes think the Era of Complete Transparency is a bad thing? “Some people think it’s good, some people think it’s bad,” she says. “For me, it’s just real.”

Which is why you’re basically behind the curve if you’re not Googling pretty much everyone you meet.

“I’m afraid that this thing I do makes me a weirdo. So, to make myself feel better, I’m going to blithely implicate you in my weirdness. By the end of the article, I’ll have rationalized, with the help of an Official Expert, that it’s not only normal, it’s inevitable.”

Sorry, weirdo. I manage to make it through the day just fine without needing to pry into the lives of my co-workers and acquaintances. If I’m not invited, it’s none of my business to eavesdrop on their online conversations with other people. Granted, many of them are indeed displaying parts of their lives in a public space. Nonetheless, out of basic politeness, I still don’t assume that I’m welcome everywhere unless specifically forbidden.

Comedy ceased to be the province of angsty and possibly drug-addled white guys making jokes about their needy girlfriends and airplane food. It became (slightly) less exclusionary to women and minorities. It began to ask, and answer, the questions that newfound diversity will tend to bring up—questions about power dynamics and privilege and cultural authority.

As comedy began to do a better job of reflecting the world, it began, as well, to take on the responsibilities associated with that reflection. It began to recognize the fact that the long debate about the things comedy owes to its audiences and itself—the old “hey, I’m just making a joke” line of logic—can be partially resolved in the idea that nothing, ultimately, is “just a joke.” Humor has moral purpose. Humor has intellectual heft. Humor can change the world. We may well deserve, as Schumer said this week, to “watch like no one’s raping.” What she didn’t say, but what is clear from her comedy, is that jokes themselves have a way of getting us what we deserve.

“How Comedians Became Public Intellectuals.” This is a typical crosseyed drooler of a thinkpiece in the Atlantic, following the exact same template as the articles you might have read there several years ago gushing about how social media, or Twitter in particular, were likewise changing the world for the better. Now, leaving aside the party-pooping fact of how injustice always seems to prove more resilient than the shiny novelty of the latest game-changer, I like to think that an actual public intellectual would be wondering if it isn’t just awfully convenient how all these things we would have been doing anyway, like reading fiction, watching stand-up comedy, and dicking around on social media turn out to be the oil lubricating the engine of historical progress, but that only serves to illustrate the unwitting accuracy of Garber’s last sentence there: we are indeed getting the intellectuals we deserve.

A second theory agrees that our unique language evolved as a means of sharing information about the world. But the most important information that needed to be conveyed was about humans, not about lions and bison. Our language evolved as a way of gossiping. According to this theory Homo sapiens is primarily a social animal. Social cooperation is our key for survival and reproduction. It is not enough for individual men and women to know the whereabouts of lions and bison. It’s much more important to know who in their band hates whom, who is sleeping with whom, who is honest, and who is a cheat…Reliable information about who could be trusted meant that small bands could expand into larger bands, and Sapiens could develop tighter and more sophisticated types of cooperation.

Yet the truly unique feature of our language is not its ability to transmit information about men and lions. Rather, it’s the ability to transmit information about things that do not exist at all. As far as we know, only Sapiens can talk about entire kinds of entities that they have never seen, touched or smelled…But fiction has enabled us not merely to imagine things, but to do so collectively. We can weave common myths such as the biblical creation story, the Dreamtime myths of Aboriginal Australians, and the nationalist myths of modern states. Such myths give Sapiens the unprecedented ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers. Ants and bees can also work together in huge numbers, but they do so in a very rigid manner and only with close relatives. Wolves and chimpanzees cooperate far more flexibly than ants, but they can do so only with small numbers of other individuals that they know intimately. Sapiens can cooperate in extremely flexible ways with countless numbers of strangers. That’s why Sapiens rule the world, whereas ants eat our leftovers and chimps are locked up in zoos and research laboratories.

In the wake of the Cognitive Revolution, gossip helped Homo sapiens to form larger and more stable bands. But even gossip has its limits. Sociological research has shown that the maximum ‘natural’ size of a group bonded by gossip is about 150 individuals. Most people can neither individually know, nor effectively gossip about, more than 150 human beings…How did Homo sapiens manage to cross this critical threshold, eventually founding cities comprising tens of thousands of inhabitants and empires ruling hundreds of millions? The secret was probably the appearance of fiction. Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths…Yet none of these things exists outside of the stories that people invent and tell one another. There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings.

Telling effective stories is not easy. The difficulty lies not in telling the story, but in convincing everyone else to believe it. Much of history revolves around this question: how does one convince millions of people to believe particular stories about gods, or nations, or limited liability companies? Yet when it succeeds, it gives Sapiens immense power, because it enables millions of strangers to cooperate and work towards common goals. Just try to imagine how difficult it would have been to create states, or churches, or legal systems if we could speak only about things that really exist, such as rivers, trees and lions.

What Russia does, with its massive military arsenal and its historically rooted resistance to absorption into the US- and NATO-dominated order, is far more important than anything the American left is currently focusing on. It’s far more important than anything ISIS does, than anything alienated European-born jihadists do. No sense can be made of it if one’s categories of analysis are ‘white’ and ‘non-white’, which again are mostly just memes disguised as categories of analysis. My own view, for which I’ve argued before, is that the best the left could do is to engage truly progressive, internationalist, anti-Putin forces within Russia, which do exist, even though most in the western left have no idea of them. Even this probably wouldn’t help much. Putin is too powerful. And neither he, nor Kadyrov, nor anyone else in the former Soviet bloc, for that matter, could care less about who won the latest White Off on Twitter.

To a casual onlooker, many of the issues being discussed on the web have a political appearance. The manner in which they are being discussed, though, demonstrates their lack of serious content. As anyone who has taken DeBoer 101 knows, race, gender, economics and geopolitics are mere tokens in a game of social media sorting, where the players compete for meaningless status. I don’t disagree with anything Smith says in his post. I just don’t know why he’s expecting to find mature discussions of serious issues in this environment, as if the average schmuck on Twitter has anything remotely insightful to say about Russia. Perhaps it’s just a rhetorical trope, intended to shame people out of their adolescent superficiality, in which case, good luck.

The choices were stark: sack a third of our workforce or cut their wages by a third. After a short board meeting we cut their wages, assured they would survive and that, with a bit of cajoling, they would return to our sweatshop in Shenzhen after their two-week break.

But that was only the start. In Zoe Svendsen’s play World Factory at the Young Vic, the audience becomes the cast. Sixteen teams sit around factory desks playing out a carefully constructed game that requires you to run a clothing factory in China. How to deal with a troublemaker? How to dupe the buyers from ethical retail brands? What to do about the ever-present problem of clients that do not pay? Because the choices are binary they are rarely palatable. But what shocked me – and has surprised the theatre – is the capacity of perfectly decent, liberal hipsters on London’s south bank to become ruthless capitalists when seated at the boardroom table.

The classic problem presented by the game is one all managers face: short-term issues, usually involving cashflow, versus the long-term challenge of nurturing your workforce and your client base. Despite the fact that a public-address system was blaring out, in English and Chinese, that “your workforce is your vital asset” our assembled young professionals repeatedly had to be cajoled not to treat them like dirt.

On matters of race, campaigners are instituting a racial hierarchy of intellectual worth. It is based on the idea that only those with ‘experience’ can properly assess a political issue pertaining to it.

There is obviously a grain of truth of truth in that – all the most powerful falsehoods are based on a grain of truth. But what happens when we embed that fact into how we conduct political discourse? We are saying that the race of the person speaking is more important than the content of their words. We base our assessment of their intellectual and moral validity on their race. This is, quite plainly, ‘negative thoughts towards another individual on the basis of their race’. It may be racism with a positive purpose. It may be a drop in the racist ocean compared to the horrors and abuses ethnic minorities go through every day. But that does not change what it is.

The colour of one’s skin has been given primacy over the content of one’s character.

Most depressingly of all, it is a rejection of the power of moral imagination. It turns its back on empathy as a political force. It does not perceive us as people fighting for the rights of others as well as ourselves. In fact, it is a highly capitalistic and right-wing vision of humanity, as self-interested units only capable of improving their own lot.

I see no reason to be optimistic that the left will ever turn away from the easy incentives of jockeying for status and position within inverted oppression hierarchies, or making vague, impotent gestures in the direction of salvific revolution. At the same time, I’m not a believer in Fukuyama’s “End of History” thesis, either. If politics itself has become ossified, then it’s likely that culture or technology will eventually provide the dynamic force to shake things up again. (Trying to be more specific than that, though, is a mug’s game.) But whatever form change takes, and whichever direction it comes from, I imagine it will take us all by surprise at first, only to appear obvious and inevitable in hindsight.

But Howe’s central point was far more serious than these occasional descents into shrillness would suggest. In turning its back on liberalism, the left was doing itself irreparable harm. Responding, no doubt, to the mutation of liberalism into the aggressive anti-communism of Lyndon B. Johnson, the left had decided that liberalism was a sham, that democracy itself (or ‘bourgeois democracy’) was merely a veiled form of capitalist domination. For Howe, terms such as ‘liberal fascism’ and the use of the word ‘totalitarian’ to describe US society – Norman Mailer was one of the culprits here – were revealing of a profound confusion. Yes, the Cold Warriors in the US government were as invested in ‘liberalism’ as Dr King, but any left that dismissed the principles of humane tolerance and disinterested speculation that were the essence of the liberal tradition was making a mighty rod for its own back.

The left, he argued, must acknowledge its roots in, as well as the necessity to go beyond – to expand upon – the liberal tradition; it must come to recognise the unity of socialism and democracy, to see socialism as the means through which democracy can be spread to the economic sphere, and not fall for the ‘pseudo-Leninist’ line that Western-style democracy is an impediment to social justice. Howe was in no doubt at all that liberalism was insufficient to solve the problems of equality and injustice. But he also knew that any left that failed to give liberalism its due would slide quickly into either authoritarianism or irrelevance. Perhaps it would not be unfair to suggest that the fate of the New Left, in the US and elsewhere, was to slide into the second, while evincing a callow sympathy for the first.

I write in my notebook with the intention of stimulating good conversation, hoping that it will also be of use to some fellow traveler. But perhaps my notes are mere drunken chatter, the incoherent babbling of a dreamer. If so, read them as such.

Vox Populi

The prose is immaculate. [You] should be an English teacher…Do keep writing; you should get paid for it, but that’s hard to find.

—Noel

You are such a fantastic writer! I’m with Noel; your mad writing skills could lead to income.

—Sandi

WOW – I’m all ready to yell “FUCK YOU MAN” and I didn’t get through the first paragraph.

—Anonymous

You strike me as being too versatile to confine yourself to a single vein. You have such exceptional talent as a writer. Your style reminds me of Swift in its combination of ferocity and wit, and your metaphors manage to be vivid, accurate and original at the same time, a rare feat. Plus you’re funny as hell. So, my point is that what you actually write about is, in a sense, secondary. It’s the way you write that’s impressive, and never more convincingly than when you don’t even think you’re writing — I mean when you’re relaxed and expressing yourself spontaneously.

—Arthur

Posts like yours would be better if you read the posts you critique more carefully…I’ve yet to see anyone else misread or mischaracterize my post in the manner you have.

—Battochio

You truly have an incredible gift for clear thought expressed in the written word. You write the way people talk.